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How To Automatically Manage FreshBooks Invoices And Clients Across Multiple Business Apps

Let’s face it – if you run a business, making money is (and should be) your number one goal. Part and parcel of this is keeping track of your financial flow, as well as your paying customers, and ensuring that your team members are always up to speed. However, staying on top of all this eats up a lot of time, which you simply don’t have… because you’re busy making money!

David, a CFO from a mid-sized consulting company based in L.A., knows this problem like the back of his hand. Once a month, just before meeting his accountant, he has to export around 200 invoices from FreshBooks to PDF files, one by one… and then back them up on Dropbox to share them with the accountant, who doesn’t have access to FreshBooks. Luckily, some are already there because he uploaded them right after they were closed – but he doesn’t remember which. As a result, some invoices are duplicated and need to be reviewed before sharing the file with the accountant, which only adds to the huge amount of time spent on manual, repetitive chores – and the growing amount Dave spends on aspirin for his headaches.

David is also responsible for adding new MailChimp subscribers each time there are new clients in FreshBooks (you can imagine how many small errors like typos can slip into the mix). And also for informing the sales team of which clients have new invoices to pay, so that this information can be safely stored inside the CRM. He has to do all this himself, since he’s the only person who has the access to the company’s FreshBooks account… Et voila! more time-consuming chores that prevent David from doing his REAL CFO job.

Make FreshBooks Your One-Stop Finance Operation Center

Knowing David’s predicament, imagine his enthusiasm when he got the chance to automate all these manual processes.

In addition to the above-mentioned apps, you can add Zendesk to the suite and connect FreshBooks to your support service.

Back To Dave’s Business

Now he’s integrated FreshBooks with the rest of his business apps, David can concentrate on his job and still keep track of his money without losing valuable time on manual updates. All his FreshBooks invoices are automatically uploaded to Dropbox and stored there securely as sharable PDFs (which also puts a smile on his accountant’s face). At the same time, the sales team sees the notes about new invoices created automatically inside Zoho CRM and gets a complete, 360-degree customer view without requiring access to the FreshBooks app. And last but not least, the marketing team always has updated lists of paying customers who should receive a targeted newsletter, at its disposal, as new FreshBooks clients are sent automatically to MailChimp as subscribers.

“I can kick back and relax because I know that my invoices are safe, my salespeople know all they need to know about the customers they deal with, and my marketing team sends newsletters to the right clients at the right time. CloudWork has freed me from repetitive manual tasks and saved me time. It has reduced all the apps I used to manage to just one. FreshBooks has become my real operation center now!” – says David.

…and make it Your One-Stop Finance Operation Center

About Christophe Primault

Christophe is co-founder and CEO at CloudWork an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) for business users and GetApp.com the largest independent marketplace for Cloud based (SaaS) business applications.